Segmenting Scenes by Matching Image Composites

In this paper, we investigate how, given an image, similar images sharing the same global description can help with unsupervised scene segmentation. In contrast to recent work in semantic alignment of scenes, we allow an input image to be explained by partial matches of similar scenes. This allows for a better explanation of the input scenes. We perform MRF-based segmentation that optimizes over matches, while respecting boundary information. The recovered segments are then used to re-query a large database of images to retrieve better matches for the target regions. We show improved performance in detecting the principal occluding and contact boundaries for the scene over previous methods on data gathered from the LabelMe database.